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Overview

Chop suey. Sushi. Curry. Adobo. Kimchi. The deep associations Asians in the United States have with food have become ingrained in the American popular imagination. So much so that contentious notions of ethnic authenticity and authority are marked by and argued around images and ideas of food.

Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader collects burgeoning new scholarship in Asian American Studies that centers the study of foodways and culinary practices in our understanding of the racialized underpinnings of Asian Americanness. It does so by bringing together twenty scholars from across the disciplinary spectrum to inaugurate a new turn in food studies: the refusal to yield to a superficial multiculturalism that naively celebrates difference and reconciliation through the pleasures of food and eating. By focusing on multi-sited struggles across various spaces and times, the contributors to this anthology bring into focus the potent forces of class, racial, ethnic, sexual and gender inequalities that pervade and persist in the production of Asian American culinary and alimentary practices, ideas, and images.

This is the first collection to consider the fraught itineraries of Asian American immigrant histories and how they are inscribed in the production and dissemination of ideas about Asian American foodways.

Product Details

About the Author

Martin F. Manalansan IV is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora.

Robert Ji-Song Ku is Associate Professor of Asian and Asian American Studies at Binghamton University. He is the author of Dubious Gastronomy: The Cultural Politics of Eating Asian in the USA (forthcoming 2013).

Anita Mannur is Associate Professor of English and Asian /Asian American Studies at Miami University. She is the author of Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture.

Table of Contents

List of Figures and Maps Acknowledgments An Alimentary Introduction Part I 1. Cambodian Donut Shops and the Negotiation of Identity in Los Angeles 2. Tasting America 3. A Life Cooking for Others 4. Learning from Los Kogi Angeles 5. The Significance of Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine in Postcolonial Hawai‘i Part II 6. Incarceration, Cafeteria Style 7. As American as Jackrabbit Adobo 8. Lechon with Heinz, Lea & Perrins with Adobo 9. “Oriental Cookery” 10. Gannenshoyu or First-Year Soy Sauce? Kikkoman Soy Sauce and the Corporate Forgetting of the Early Japanese American ConsumerPart III 11. Twenty-First-Century Food Trucks 12. Samsa on Sheepshead Bay 13. Apple Pie and Makizushi 14. Giving Credit Where It Is Due 15. Beyond AuthenticityPart IV 16. Acting Asian American, Eating Asian American 17. Devouring Hawai‘i 18. “Love Is Not a Bowl of Quinces” 19. The Globe at the Table 20. Perfection on a PlateBibliography ContributorsIndex

Editorial Reviews

[Manalansan] coedits the interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring the ways in which eating and culinary practices reflect and reinforce class, racial, and gender inequalities among Asian-American immigrants.”-Rochester Review

"The essays themselves are readable and concise. Each scholar... [is] successful in reaching a very large audience, from Asian American scholars to those simply interested in food histories and identities." -Christopher Patterson,The International Examiner

"Full of provocation and insight, this collection productively investigates the complicated and often racialized relationships between consumer, producer, and nation. Foundational in its interdisciplinary, transnational critique of cuisine-driven multiculturalism, Eating Asian America skillfully navigates the vexed terrain of food politics."-Cathy J. Schlund-Vials,author of War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work

"Featuring 20 essays, this volume connects Asian food to larger social, economic, political, and historical contexts in the US....The essays in this volume not only constitute the first academic book on the topic with such comprehensiveness, but also investigate the social hierarchy that exists around race, gender, sex, class, and ethnicity."-Y. Kiuchi,CHOICE

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

An academic work focusing on the influence of Asian-American cuisine. I admit, the book couldn't keep my attention for long periods of time, but there are some points of interest regarding Asian-immigration as traced through the evolution of food.
I enjoyed the essay on School Lunch in Hawaii, mostly because recipes are included. I wish more recipes were scattered throughout the text; it would have helped me be more involved with the text.
The history featured throughout the book is fascinating and well-researched. The problem is that it makes for dry reading - I found this read best in several short reading sessions focusing on one chapter at a time.
I received a free advanced copy of this book in exchange for a review.

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